Getting the biggest scoops since high school

Published 4:00 am, Friday, July 27, 2007

Megan Greenwell was a reporter at Berkeley High School's biweekly student newspaper, the Jacket, nearly eight years ago when she cracked one of the most sensational Bay Area news stories of the year -- scooping the region's media.

It was the tale of a teenage girl from India, an unregistered student at Greenwell's school, who died from a carbon monoxide leak in a Berkeley apartment building whose owner had brought her to America for cheap labor and sex.

So it's no fluke that Greenwell, now at the ripe old age of 23, is a professional journalist at not just any newspaper, but the Washington Post. And she's not covering any average beat; she's based in Baghdad and covering one of the world's biggest stories, the war in Iraq.

Greenwell's most recent stories, including one about a suicide bombing that killed 22 people in a shopping district in southern Iraq, have appeared this week in The Chronicle.

"The Jacket did train us pretty well," Greenwell said in a phone interview Thursday from her home and office in a protected Baghdad neighborhood. "I stumbled into my involvement in the first place and had it not been so rewarding, there's no reason to believe I would have kept doing it beyond high school."

In December 1999, Greenwell, then 16, and Jacket staffer Iliana Monatuk broke the story about the girl from India. Greenwell's initial stories led to a full-blown federal investigation and a slew of indictments, and toppled a wealthy Berkeley real estate tycoon whose holdings were estimated in excess of $60 million.

Lakireddy Bali Reddy was sentenced to more than 8 years in federal prison for his role as the head of a scheme that brought Indian immigrants to the United States as slaves and in the cases of at least two young girls, for the purpose of providing sex to male members of the wealthy Indian immigrant clan.

I always thought it was fitting that Reddy, a man who preyed on teenage girls, was himself cut down to size by a couple of female teenage reporters.

Greenwell is a long way from Berkeley's Center Street these days. She covers her hair with a shawl whenever she leaves the house and does her best to appear as an everyday Iraqi woman going about her business.

"I got into journalism to be on the front lines of the biggest stories and this place is totally intense," she said. "The city is very alive, there are big commercial areas where people walk normally and restaurants are open, but there are random acts of violence everywhere," she said.

On Tuesday, four car bombs were detonated in the same neighborhoods she had driven through a day earlier.

"You can't really go anywhere safely," Greenwell said. "There are ways to do it more and less safely, but nothing is really safe."

Nonetheless, she plans to make the most of her tour, which will include a three- to four-day trip into the field as an embedded journalist with a U.S. military unit. As a woman, she hopes to gain access to Iraqi women and children and schools and write about the daily lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens living amid the chaos.

Hearing sporadic bomb blasts, mortar and gunfire takes some getting used to, but it's part of the background atmosphere in a country at war. The victory of the Iraqi national soccer team earlier this week prompted a celebration of automatic gunfire that lasted more than hour, Greenwell added, providing some journalistic context to describe her new neighborhood.

"I've been very lucky," she said. "The scariest moments for me so far have been when there is violence where we live. A car bomb killed 25 people today and when it went off, the whole building shook -- and it's scary."

Naturally, Greenwell's parents, who are as proud as parents can be, are also scared to death for her safety. Her mother, Gail Greenwell, traveled to Washington, D.C., three weeks ago to help her daughter prepare for her job assignment.

"I went with her to pick up her body armor," mom said.

Gail Greenwell said she was impressed with the preparation and training provided by the newspaper for every staff member who serves in the combat zone. A private company provides instructions on how to avoid being kidnapped and how to behave if it does happen, along with a course on desert survival.

Even with all of that, Gail Greenwell, an Episcopal priest, says her daughter's name has been passed on through her religious connections to prayer lists around the country.

"We've always known this is what she was preparing to do, ever since the Reddy story broke when she was 16 years old," Mom said. "Are we worried? Sure we're worried, but we have a very strong faith background and community to fall back on."

Like a budding major-league star, Greenwell spent each summer before her 2005 graduation from Columbia University honing her writing and reporting skills. Her stops along the way included internships at the Berkeley Daily Planet, the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Toledo Blade. In her last year of college, Greenwell was editor in chief of the student-run Columbia Daily, for which she had written since her freshman year.

And when her parents asked her if going to Baghdad was really what she needed to do, her answer convinced them.

"She said it was 'the story of my generation,' whose outcome would affect U.S. domestic and foreign policy affairs, probably for the rest of her life," Gail Greenwell said. "How do you argue with that?"

You don't. You hope, you pray and you keep the faith, 'cause that's all you can do. And keep reading the dispatches from a promising young reporter who cut her teeth in Berkeley.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.